First I would like to apologize for the delay with this manuscript. Due to lack of action by the handling guest editor I have now taken over the manuscript.
Based on the reply to the reviewer comments I invite the authors to submit a revised version of their manuscript. In addition I ask the authors to include my following comment when preparing a revised version:
p. 19223-19224: please make sure your definitions of carbon cycle terms are consistent with Wohlfahrt & Gu (2015; 10.1111/pce.12569) – actually your terminology left me pretty much confused

The authors have responded reasonably to the reviewer comments and revised their manuscript accordingly. I have a couple of more comments, which I ask the authors to take into account, before I can accept the manuscript. Please revised the manuscript accordingly and include a point-by-point reply with the revised manuscript. I apologize for these late comments, but as I had only recently taken over the manuscript, I had not chance make these comments at an earlier stage.

Editor comments:
p. 3, l. 23: break up sentence
p. 6, l. 21: no first objective formulated (at least not formally)
p. 6, l. 24: explored instead of explore d
p. 7, l. 2: maybe formulate this as a third objective
Figure 1: not all climate classes are explained; in case not all are present in the map – remove from figure legend; AU_How is hard to read and the dot would be better visible if a different color was used
p. 9, l. 22; u* - the star should be sub-scripted (i.e. u*) ; while -1 should be super-scripted in s-1
p. 11, l. 1-18: this hinges critically on whether or not the chosen time windows (16 days in this case) includes the full range of environmental conditions, in particular PAR – clearly, if PAR values are restricted to the linear portion of the light response curve, e.g. GEPsat will be highly uncertain – I imagine this to be an issue during the rainy season
Figures 5-6: axes should be scaled such that any within-plot panels do not overlap with or hide data points
p. 22, l. 22-23: might be worth including a reference to earlier work where the same approach was followed, e.g. in Biogeosciences Wohlfahrt et al. (2010) or Balzarolo et al. (2015)
section 4.1: cites only two references – I suggest to include more references to the literature, as otherwise the text appears overly descriptive

With these last changes I accept the manuscript for publication in BG.